Kubuntu

Gerv Markham, a friend and mentor to many in the Mozilla community, passed away last night surrounded by his family.

Gerv worked at Mozilla for many years working in a variety of capacities including being a lead developer of Bugzilla and most recently working on special projects under the Mozilla Chairwoman.

I had the pleasure of working with Gerv in the Thunderbird community and most recently on the MOSS Grants Committee as one of the inaugural members. Between these two areas, I often sought Gerv’s mentoring and advice, as he always had wisdom to share.

Anyone who has been intimately involved with the Mozilla project likely engaged Gerv from time to time, although much of his work was behind the scenes but nonetheless important work.

I think it goes without saying Gerv had a significant impact on the open web through his contributions to Bugzilla and various projects that moved the open web forward and he championed the values of the Mozilla manifesto. All of us who knew him and got the opportunity to collaborate were rewarded with a good friend and valuable wisdom that will be missed.

Thanks Gerv for being a friend of Mozilla and the open web and you will be surely missed.

Today I learned of some of the worst kind of news, my friend and a valuable contributor to the great open source community Nóirín Plunkett passed away. They (this is their preferred pronoun per their twitter profile) was well regarded in the open source community for contributions.

I had known them for about four years now, having met them at OSCON and seen them regularly at other events. They were always great to have a discussion with and learn from and they always had a smile on their face.

It is very sad to lose them as they demonstrated an unmatchable passion and dedication to open source and community and surely many of us will spend many days, weeks and months reflecting on the sadness of this loss.

I have come up with a new phrase and I am going to keep saying it and it is “The most important open source software has not yet been made.” But why is this phrase true? Simply put we have a lot of great open source software out there but the most important open source software is the one that’s not been written because of some barrier or challenge.

For every person, different software has different levels of importance right? So what is the most important unwritten open source software for me? Well it is health tech software that enables people to better understand how their health is and how their choices can impact it positively and negatively.

I was recently diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes and I have from the get-go tried to use technology and software to help me manage it. From graphing my glucose levels so I know how different foods impact me to tracking medication and other important metrics. But one thing stuck out when I was looking at available tools is that there are not many open source health tech applications and tools available and those that did exist were inferior to the proprietary ones.

So why is it important to have these tools be open source if the proprietary ones work well? Simply put, if you have the source code you can trust your data is kept private and safe but also you can build off the tools and integrate them with other services and tools that work specifically for you.

That being said, I came up with the idea of launching a Open Source Project and have formed a team of amazing individuals who share my vision of creating tools to help the millions of people worldwide suffering from both Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes. We are moving forward with that and are right now in the planning stage of launching the Glucosio Project (Italian for Glucose). The project will initially launch an Android app, then iOS and finally a web app (Think Tizen, Ubuntu Phone, Firefox OS) to allow diabetics to track their glucose and connect with third party services (IFTT, Phillips Hue, Pushbullet, Pushover etc), share the data and better understand the impact of their choices. We very well may expand as the project and contributor base but this is what we have envisioned so far.

We still have room for more (Dev, Doc, Creative, l10n etc) and if you are interested in contributing to this project please get in touch with us at hello [at] glucosio.org or follow the project on Github. We hope to make a big difference in many people’s lives with the apps we are working on and hope you will join us!

I’m happy to announce today that the Kubuntu Council unanimously approved my request for Kubuntu Membership. As I explained in response to a question by Jonathan Riddell, I have felt for a long time that Kubuntu Project distills the Ubuntu values and has a great sense of community that many long time Ubuntu Contributors might remember from the earlier days of Ubuntu.

I’m very happy to join the Kubuntu Team and look forward to supporting the project through contributions in my spare time.